7 Chilpancingo, Guerrero Seminary Report “Civilian Monitor for the Guerrero Police: Dialogue with National and International Experience” © 2008 by Fundar, Centro de Análisis e Investigación, A.C. Published by Fundar, Centro de Análisis e Investigación, Cerrada de Alberto Zamora Núm. 21, Villa Coyoacán, C.P. 04000, México D.F. Civilian Oversight for the Guerrero Police: Dialogue with National and Interna- tional Experience / by Hector Iván Saenz, Antia Mendoza and Juan Salgado. Project Coordination: Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña “Tlachinollan”, A.C. Fundar, Centro de Análisis e Investigación, A.C. Instituto para la Seguridad y la Democracia, A.C. Edition: Andrea De La Barrera Montppellier Translation: Sabina Trigueros Style Correction: Genio + Figura Design Cover & Layout: Deikon S.A. de C.V. Design & Layout: Genio + Figura Printing: DISSA Impresores Photo Cover: Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña “Tlachinollan” ISBN: 978-607-7631-00-2 Printed in México. October 2008 This publication was made possible by the generous grants from: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Foundation Open Society Institute Tinker Foundation 3 Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña “Tlachinollan”, A.C. (“Tlachinollan” Mountain Human Rights Center) The Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Center is an NGO based in Tlapa de Comonfort, Guerrero, Mexico. It’s mission, for almost 14 years, has been to promote and defend the rights of the Nahua, Mixtec, Tlalpanec and Mestizo peoples in the Guerrero mountains, and to help design legitimate and pacific means to guarantee their human rights. One of the objectives of our work is to influence the structural causes of human rights violations in Guerrero. Thus, we have developed a strategy consisting in an integral defense of human rights, which involves all the areas Tlachinollan works in: • Education Area. This area provides workshops and makes didactic material on human rights, focusing on the collective rights of the indigenous peoples. It works directly with communities and their authority figures for the design and implementation of both. • Communications Area. This area seeks to make the human rights situation in the Mountain region, as well as the cases Tlachinollan takes on, known to the general population. • International Area. This area is in charge of spreading information on this situation internationally, in particular through strategic relations with organizations such as Human Rights Watch, WOLA, Amnesty International and the German Human Right Coordi- nation. It also works in communication and advocacy with special rapporteurs from the United Nations and the OAS. In addition, it has a program for the attention of human rights violations victims, which provides guidance and psychological attention. • Legal Area. This area provides legal counseling and assumes the defense in cases of human rights violations, working towards 4 “Tlachinollan” Mountain Human Rights Center attaining better access to justice for the population. Another part of its work consists in mediation between both sides of a conflict among individuals, promoting peaceful and satisfactory settlements for both parties, and thus allowing people to avoid dealing with official institutions and being subjected to time consuming and costly processes. This defense strategy involves legal, communications, political advocacy, articulation with national and international actors, and education actions, and it has allowed us to build representative cases of human rights violations, which, in turn, has made it possible for us to foresee the most significant problems in this area in order to create proposals for legislative and public policy reforms that would influence their causes. http://www.tlachinollan.org 5 Fundar, Centro de Análisis e Investigación, A.C. (Fundar, Analysis and Research Center) Created in 1999, Fundar is a non-profit, plural, independent organization with no ties to any political party, which seeks to contribute towards the consolidation of substantive democracy. Fundar has specialized, since its creation, in the analysis of public budgets and policy, and in the precise monitoring of institutions to promote accountability, thus helping strengthen democratic institutions. One of the founding principles of Fundar is to advance towards the rule of law and the guarantee of human rights. The strategies Fundar follows are: to widen and strengthen citizen participation; to demand transparency and accountability; and to promote substantial equality. The main tool it uses is advocacy based on evidence, led by the effort to find creative solutions to the problems the country faces, and form proposals characterized by rigorous and interdisciplinary research. Currently, Fundar works in four large areas: transparency and accountability, public budgets and policy, strengthening of citizen capacities, and human rights and citizen security. The human rights and citizen security area coordinates projects that explore creative options for social change in key sectors for the democratization process in Mexico, and it evaluates the efficiency of public institutions in charge of safeguarding human rights in our country through strategic monitoring and litigation. Since 2003, Fundar began to study accountability alternatives for police systems, based on the perspective of citizen security. Through 2004 and 2005, Fundar coordinated in Mexico Metágora Project. Which is an study of the irregularities, power abuse and mistreatment of police officers and public attorneys in the Federal District.The research is currently being applied in three municipalities of Querétaro State. 6 Fundar, Analysis and Research Center In this sense, the citizen security program has dedicated to analyze accountability mechanisms of public security institutions in the Federal District (Mexico), aiming at ameliorating policing practices, through disseminating learned lessons from such models to other municipalities in Mexico; and through collaboration with police corporation at municipalities in order to acheive democratic schemes of policing through capacity building. http://www.fundar.org.mx 7 Instituto para la Seguridad y la Democracia, A.C., Insyde (Insyde, Spanish acronym for the Institute for Security and Democracy) The Institute for Security and Democracy (Insyde) is an autonomous, trans-disciplinary civilian organization founded in 2003. It is made up of a group of investigators specialized in public security, democratic political reform, criminal justice and investigative journalism in public security and violence. Five years since its creation, Insyde has built and consolidated relationships with national and international civil society organizations, academic institutions and cooperation organisms. Its purpose is to support the strengthening of a democratic state within a space of respect of human rights, assuming the conviction that police reform sustained in civilian action builds towards an authentic democratic cohabitation. Insyde also orients its actions towards aiding the constitution of new forms of interactions between citizens and the police; in order to achieve this, the organization participates in actions and initiatives such as the Altus-Alliance Global Week of Police Visitations. We count, among our greatest international achievements, with the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, granted in March of 2007, its second edition, by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to Insyde and eight other organizations from the United States, Nigeria, Nepal, India y Russia. This has served as an incentive that strengthens our commitment with our institutional objectives, and pushes us to continue our work. Insyde further advances towards its goals by adopting and incorporating new perspectives and methodologies, which allow it to get to know and collaborate with police institutions using a positive, respectful and co-responsible approach. 8 Insyde. Institute for Security and Democracy For the past two-and-a-half years, Insyde has collaborated with Fundar Center for Analysis and Research and the Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Center to create “Civilian Monitor for the Police and Security Forces in the Guerrero Mountain in Mexico”, an unprecedented project since its origin due to its creation by civil society. http://www.insyde.org.mx 9 1. INTRODUCTION Robert Varenik, an expert in democratic reform of security and justice institutions once said, “Good ideas must cross borders.” Civilian supervision of police forces is, without a doubt, one of those good ideas that cross any border, and Chilpancingo, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, was the stage for the first exchange of ideas on the subject in an event unprecedented in Mexico, which took place on August 30-31 and September 1st. To quote some of the participants, internationally renowned experts on the issue, the event was historic, due to the initiative of civil society leading it, the platform of academic research on which it was sustained, the international impulse behind it, the close accompaniment of the organizations that designed the first civilian police monitoring program in Mexico, and the promising reception of the proposal both by authorities in the state of Guerrero and international organizations of the utmost relevance, such as the United Nations. Those days, the expectations for the project were high, and now there is great excitement about the reality: the Civilian Police Monitor (Mocipol, Spanish acronym) for the mountains